Music, to be suitable for congregational use, must clearly possess certain distinguishing qualities, which it will be wise to try and define at the outset. Firstly it must be simple. Even in parishes where no prejudice against congregational singing exists to be overcome, it is necessary both to avoid the discouragement caused by attempting music too elaborate mclodically, too complex rhythmically, or of too great vocal compass; and to avoid, even worse, complacency in the unworthy performance of too difficult works. Secondly, it should be sufficiently appreciable in terms of current musical idioms to embody the virtues of popularity.

The Bible reading which I want to write about, is that which I have practised, the Bible reading of parents and children together; which is indeed the only way in which I have read the Bible—apart from the experience of listening to the lessons in the Church of England as a child, and some rather unsuccessful attempts to read parts to myself in later years. As a family we have read it daily, in principle—though in practice there have been a good many gaps—for ten years or more—that is, from earliest childhood in the case of the youngest, to manhood in the case of the eldest child. In this paper I want to offer some reflections on our experience in the hope that they may be useful to others. Our main experience, that constant Bible reading from childhood is overwhelmingly a good thing, is something which surely goes without saying.

The picture is of a medium-sized church, well filled with mothers and fathers and children of all ages—a baby probably intent on also being heard, and dozens of very small children, restless, crawling about, biting father's ear and being shushed by mother. Besides the family groups there are young men and young girls, more or less aware of one another and the show they are putting up. As with the family groups, the old and the young may or may not have missals, a prayer-book, their rosary-beads. While one would hope that those who have come to Mass, armed with nothing more than their offering, are contemplatives who have passed beyond the stage of actually saying prayers and wondering whether mental prayer or the prayer of quiet is best suiting their spiritual progress, it is not, I think, uncharitable to assume that a high percentage are in church simply because Sunday Mass is an obligation under pain of mortal sin, because it is the custom to which they have been brought up, or because of some more or less clear conviction that bodily presence at Sunday Mass, with an attempt now and then to remember what they are in church for, is an act of religion.

During our study of the ‘Patristic Heritage’ in the second of these articles on the ‘History of Spirituality’ we considered the fulfilment of that heritage as reaching to St Benedict (ϯ547), for in St Benedict and his new Western monasticism we can see as it were summed up the ideals of the patristic age on Christian perfection. And with St Benedict we are on the threshold of the middle ages in Europe: the Roman Empire of the West had ceased to be, and the new nations created by the Goths and the Franks were emerging and leading to the Holy Roman Empire that was the political background of so much of medieval Christianity.

Readers of Sir Walter Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel may perhaps recall the Dwarf in the poem, and ‘how much he marvelled’ to find that the wounded opponent of Lord Cranstoun,

‘ … a knight of pride
Like a book-bosomed priest should ride.’

And the context reveals that he

‘thought not to search or staunch the wound
Until the secret he had found.'

Ignoring the fact that ‘the mighty book’ in this instance was none other than a magic book of spells by Sir Walter's medieval namesake Michael, and attending to the simile alone, we learn from the poet's own explanatory but confusing note, that ‘The book-a-bosom priests were those who went to a distance to baptize or marry with the Mass-book in their breasts'. Without any pedantic head-shaking in the direction of Abbotsford we may pass from the wounded knight to a more familiar modern figure, that of the travelling cleric, not book-bosomed perhaps, so much as book-pocketed or book-brief-cased.

‘What is the use of life and health if we cannot throw them away for so great a King and Lord?’ asked St Teresa of Avila, and her words could stand as a kind of headline for the life of Edel Quinn, whose cause for beatification has lately been introduced. For it was a woman fighting a losing battle against tuberculosis who blazed the Legion of Mary’s trail over much of Africa. Yet you could meet Edel and not notice anything particular about her, a Dublin typist going to daily mass, spending her free time for the legion; there are thousands more hke that. And this gives special interest to her beatification cause; that she was so much of the ordinary stream of Irish Catholicism and achieved such extraordinary results makes her appear a kind of patron and pace setter for the contemporary lay apostolate.

Edel Quinn was born in Kanturk, Co. Cork, on September Hth, 1907.

In the first of these articles it was explained that the series is being written with the conviction that an historical approach to Christian teaching on the spiritual life, an enquiry into the thought of successive masters on the subjects of prayer and perfection, will be a powerful aid to the deepening of our own understanding of what the knowledge, love and service God means to each one of us today.

The roots of Christian thinking on prayer and the spiritual life are to be found with the Greek Fathers of the East, whose teaching sprang in the early centuries from the Gospel itself, forming a great heritage from which grew the medieval development in Western Christian thought (while the East has preserved, and continues to preserve, the treasures of the patristic heritage), and in the West at the close of the middle ages the systems of the devotio moderna in turn grew out of the medieval developments.

The story of Bl. Anthony's capture by pirates, of his apostasy, recantation and glorious death, comes to us from two very trustworthy witnesses who both knew the saint. One was his fellow-captive and an eye-witness of his martyrdom, the other was the Dominican provincial in Sicily, from where Anthony had sailed to imprisonment and death. The first of these was a Jeronymite hermit, Fr Constantius of Capri, who had been carried captive to Tunis some considerable time before the arrival of Anthony. Shortly after the latter's martyrdom on 10 April 1460 he wrote a long account of all that had happened to him, and sent it to the Dominicans in Sicily, whose provincial, Fr Peter Ranzano, had welcomed Anthony to the island three years before. Fr Ranzano embodied this account in a letter he wrote to Pope Pius II, and added details of his own which he had evidently learned from the Genoese traders in Tunis on their visits to Sicily.

There are many people today who condemn the efforts that are being made to make the liturgy more intelligible. The Mass and the Sacraments, they say, are mysteries; it is only right that they should be unintelligible. All this concentration on the instructive power of the liturgy is a false emphasis; the ceremonies of the liturgy are not meant to teach, they are meant to convey a feeling of reverential awe for the great mysteries of our salvation which are beyond the power of our understanding. Why this desire to have everything pat and plain, to hear and understand all the words of the Mass? The Church uses mysterious rites and a language that is not easily understood because the liturgy expresses mysteries that cannot be understood. A hundred years ago as great a scholar as Dom Guerangcr could write: ‘The Church … proclaims her victorious and immutable doctrine in the language of the people who hear her; but her mission is not only to instruct this people.

Pope Leo XIII once called the Heart of Christ ‘a new Labarum, a battle standard in our war not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, the rulers of the world of this darkness'. It might look like a Mazdean symbol, the winged sun disc that the prophet Malachias sings about: ‘the Sun of Justice shall arise with healing in his wings.'

Surely our world is sick; healing is to be found in the Heart of Christ. Nervous breakdowns are all too common. They follow the formula: where P stands for predisposition, S for stress and R for resistance. The predisposition is our character which is an integration of habits on temperament. Now the temperament part of character is inherited. It is physical, or if you prefer, chemical, glandular. Medical science is learning to manage it more and more, but whether any complete cure will ever be found for a difficult temperament, other than getting a new set of grandparents, yet remains to be seen.

You have asked me, brother Deogratias, to write you something useful about instructing candidates for the catechumenate, for you tell me that at Carthage, where you are a deacon, those who receive their first instruction in the Christian faith are often brought to you, because you are supposed to have great facility in catechizing with your thorough knowledge of the faith and your charm of style.

A christian is a man who believes that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. In saying this he does not mean that Christ was begotten of ‘a god’ and a human mother, as the Greeks and Romans conceived of their heroes, or that he was a kind of superman as some Christian denominations seem to think. Christ was-is-God himself, in some mysterious way identical with and yet distinct from the God or the old testament who thundered on Sinai.

A mature Christian is a man or woman who lives the life Christ brought us as an integrated personality. All his powers, intellect, will and heart, are fully developed, working in harmony to do God's will. By the heart I mean that centre of our being which responds to reality as a whole. It is the seat of our response to physical and moral beauty, to all values.

The sacrament of order is much less familiar to most people than the sacraments which have so far been considered. Every Catholic has been baptized, confirmed, has gone to confession; many are married or have assisted at a marriage; very few have taken part in an ordination. The priesthood is often falsely thought of as a special privileged state, remote from the Catholic community at large, and naturally there is little interest in the sacrament by which priests are made. We must therefore begin by getting an idea of the meaning of priesthood in relation to the whole Christian people.

A priest is a man who offers sacrifice to God. In the Old Testament we find careful regulations for the offering of ritual sacrifices of every kind by the official priests.

And when Jesus was in Bethania, in the house of Simon the leper, there came to him a woman having an alabaster box of precious ointment, and poured it on his head as he was at table.’ (Matt, xxvi, 6f.) At first sight it seems as thoughts all the evangelists refer to the same woman, but in fact this is not so. I think that three of them do, but that John is describing another, and more glorious person—the sister of Lazarus. Matthew's apparently casual mention of Simon's leprosy is to show why the woman came so confidently to Jesus. Leprosy was a filthy and repellent disease; and yet she saw that Jesus had healed the man (or he would not have chosen to remain in his company), and had now gone to his home. This made her certain that he could easily rid her soul of sin. Again, the mention of the place, Bethania, is significant.

Is ‘Catholic Ecumenism’ a contraction in terms? Many Catholics inside and outside the Roman Church do in fact appear to consider that the ecumenical movement is a wholly Protestant phenomenon. References to the dangers of ‘panprotestantism’ have been made in the Church Assembly itself! It is therefore interesting to note that a writer in Istina, the French Roman Catholic quarterly, considers that the use of the term ‘oecuménisme catholique’ is fully justified, because the word ‘ecumenism’ is properly used to designate ‘the totality of the attempts made by the Christian world for the restoration of Christian unity'.

There is in fact a considerable ‘ecumenical movement’ in the Roman Catholic Church, especially in France and Germany but not by any means without its reflection in Rome. Roman Catholic ecumenists are more numerous on the continent than many Anglicans realize. Among those writing in French we may specially recall the names of Fathers Boyer, Lialine, Dumont, Couturier and Congar, while the Germans include Metzger (martyred by the Nazis), Pribilla and Sartory.

YOU have just been reborn of water and the spirit—that is why you are called infants—and so you look at this food and drink on this table of the Lord's in an altogether new light, and regard it with fresh feelings of love and reverence. And now the duty of preaching a sermon, and the care I have spent in giving birth to you so that Christ might be formed m you, compels me to explain to you what it means, what it is about—this great and divine sacrament, this noble and superlative medicine, this clean and simple sacrifice, which is now offered, no longer in just one city, the earthly Jerusalem, nor in the tabernacle which Moses or the temple which Solomon constructed (these were just shadows of things to come); no, now it is sacrificed from ‘the rising of the sun to its setting’ as the prophets foretold, and it is offered to God as a victim of praise according to the grace of the new covenant.

A legend, once extremely widespread and influential both in the Eastern and Western Churches, relates that Abgar V, king of Edessa 4 B.C. to 58 A.D.) once exchanged messages with our Lord. Two main versions of Abgar's letter and our Lord's reply have been preserved: the first in Eusebius History of the Church, the second in the fourth-century Syriac document known as the Doctrine of Addai. It is from the latter that my translation is taken. Addai, so the legend goes, was the disciple sent to King Abgar at Edessa after the Ascension, in fulfilment of our Lord's promise. Edessa was from a very early date the centre of Syriac-speaking Christianity, and it was thither that St Ephraem transferred his school in 363, when Nisibis, his native town, fell into the hands of the Persians. Even by that time the legend must already have been well established. It is valuable, not of course as an historical record, for it is completely apocryphal, but as a very early witness to the spirit of direct and simple piety which is characteristic of the best traditions of Syriac Christianity.

Abgar would have liked to make the journey to Palestine in person, and to see with his own eyes all the things that Christ was doing. But he could not travel to a territory of the Romans other than his own, lest this should provide an occasion for the malice of his enemies. For this reason he wrote a letter, and sent it to Christ by the hand of Hannan, the scribe. Hannan left Edessa on the fourteenth of March, and arrived at Jerusalem on the twelfth of April, in four weeks. Having found Christ at the house of Gamaliel, a great man among the Jews. he read the letter before him.

You may have wondered why this title consisted of the word relationship in the singular, instead of relationships, in the plural. There is a significance in it. The baby is born into one relationship, that with the mother, and ends up, if all goes well, in one relationship, that with God. All that happens in between is a development from this first simple relationship and at the same time a preparing for the very different sort of simple relationship in which we all hope to end, and for which this life on earth is a preparation. It is intended today to examine the psychological development of relationship in this life in the light of its function in preparation us for the final relationship in the life to come, with special reference to the position of young students in their last few years at school.

Much has recently been written in the popular press about that vast army of women who live on their own. Following the publication of such articles, a number of these people hotly denied that they are lonely but many others admitted that their loneliness is so great that it is the overwhelming aspect of their lives. Let us hope that no Catholic women were amongst those who made this sad admission: there is certainly no need for them to do so.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, to be lonely is to be ‘solitary, isolated, unfrequented, companionless'. What an impossible situation for the practising Catholic! Frequent reception of Holy Communion and a thoughtful pondering over the doctrine of the Indwelling must immediately prevent sucn abysmal loneliness. The woman who lives alone has perhaps more chance than many others to think frequently how the whole of her life is a partnership with Christ.